(4)Zelda vs (6)Sonic the Hedgehog (Legends Bracket) 2018
Ulti's Analysis Good hell, Zelda. This contest had four matches where someone in the Noble Nine lost to someone from outside the group. Pikachu > Mega Man, Zelda > Snake, Tifa > Sephiroth, and this match. I think in terms of overall impact Sephiroth's loss was the worst one, but this match here where Zelda made Sonic look like an absolute scrub was by far the biggest blowout of any of those four matches. We covered Sonic's near misses in the Sonic/Auron writeup, but it's worth noting that Sonic has some bad losses when he faces the upper tier in these contests. Samus has embarrassed him three times now. Cloud in 2003 was the match that made everyone go "uh oh, Cloud's got a real shot at this", because Sonic got his ass beat so badly that year. Link has beaten him like a drum, his games always underwhelm, and his performances in multi-way polls are just awful. And none of that prepared anyone for just how awful Zelda made the dude look here. This wasn't some bandwagon fluke where Zelda won close. She was the stronger character in this match and this was never actually a match. In fact Sonic is lucky this wasn't a whole lot worse. Zelda easily could have had 58% had she not taken her foot off the gas, and for my money this is Sonic's worst loss of his career. Getting blown out by Link or Cloud is one thing. Getting blown out by Zelda is quite something else, and proves one important thing on top of Zelda merely being on some BotW-induced steroids. Sonic is a Nintendo character now. And when you're a Nintendo character, bad things happen when you go up against The Legend of Zelda. Ask any of them. They've all bent the knee. The Zelda series is basically the Lannisters, or the Protheans, or Thanos, the ancient Romans. Bend the knee, or die. Those are your options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZrDEUldGr0 And yes I'm using Sonic losses to get hyped for Marvel movies and Game of Thrones and all the other great things coming in 2019 like 4 months early. I give no fucks. Sonic even looks like the Stark sigil and Zelda might as well be Cersei. Link can be Jon Snow, Cloud can be Jamie Lannister, Sheik can be Arya, and most importantly, Samwell Tarly is Tingle. Hell you could make the entire GoT cast with Zelda characters. Oh and did you think Zelda was finished playing the game of thrones in this contest? We've created a monster, gentlemen. This was going to get so much worse before it got better. Safer777's Analysis Zelda beat Snake who has to be the strongest non Nintendo character and maybe even Number 2 on this site. No way she would lose to Sonic. And after the previous match of Sonic where he couldn't even break 55% on Auron he didn't stand a chance. So Zelda won fairly easy. If Sonic managed to score above 45% I would consider this a really good result but now? I guess Sonic has to be the 2nd weakest NN member now. And Zelda of course continues to impress. Maybe star of the contest. Extremely strong of course. Also this is the worse defeat for a NNer against a non NNer too! Tsunami's Analysis Oh, hey, speaking of dwindling vote totals... It should be noted that Sonic had fewer votes in this match than Crono did in the previous one, but got a better percentage. Though this could be in part because Allen forced voters to vote for all matches taking place on a given day or for none of them, and Cloud-Crono, in addition to being a big draw for GameFAQs' core fanbase, was paired with Link-Pikachu, while Zelda-Sonic was paired with yet another Mario-Samus match. Granted, we love Mario-Samus matches, because there's never any shortage of people arguing that this will finally be Samus's chance to upset Mario. And it's not really a bad argument, per se. Samus does look like she's almost there, and picking Samus > Mario was what won raytan the Guru Contest in 2013 even if it only worked out because Mario had gotten upset in an earlier round. Anyway this is pretty much the most anti-climactic "upset" you'll ever see, which is to say, it was only an upset in the sense that pre-contest, we still thought that the only non-NN characters a member of the Noble Nine would lose to were rallybait. Not a single Oracle picked Sonic to win here, and why would they when Zelda had already dispatched the superior Snake? Even in the Guru, the favorite won--which is to say that no one had Sonic winning this match, while one entry had Zelda...oh, no, wait, that was the dummy entry used to bugfix the double elimination. Titled "Mr Bad Picks". Yeah, not really so bad after all, is it? The second chance bracket also had Zelda being carried over by a majority of those who had picked her to beat Snake. The initial brackets? ...Yeah, barely, but then again that was already a very small amount. Makes the Top 25 for "most surprising 1v1 results", though it narrowly misses out on the Top 25 overall. Category:2018 Contest Matches